Sacrifice In Barbara Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible

There is strong juxtaposition in The Poisonwood Bible when it comes to American versus Congolese culture. While Mama Mwanza is viewed as equal in the Congo for her disability, Adah is considered an outcast in American society because of her hemiplegia. Ruth May talks about Mama Mwanza’s disability as if it is something strange, yet she reveals that the people living in their village do not look at Mama Mwanza as any different from them. She says that “Why, they just don’t let on, like she was a regular person. Nobody bats their eye when she scoots by on her hands and goes on down to her field or the river to wash clothes with the other ladies that work down there every day.” The phrasing of this implies that the Price family looks at Mama Mwanza

In the entirety of the book, the Price family is uncomfortable and ignorant of everyone, and everything around them. Nathan Price, the girl’s father and Orleanna’s husband, gave up not only his own comfort and safety, but his family’s for what he thought was the greater good. The family(mainly the children and mother) hadn’t realized how much they valued their home and

Leah Price from “The Poisonwood Bible,” is a teenager in 1950, and Tata Ndu is an old leader of Kilanga, a small village in the Congo. Leah’s family is on a Baptist mission to the Congo and Leah’s family resides in Tata Ndu’s village. Everything the Price family preaches is against the values of the people of KIlanga, namely Tata Ndu. Leah has progressive opinions about women, and Tata Ndu is set in his ways of demeaning women. Leah believes that women should have responsibility outside the home, but Tata Ndu says that women belong in the home. Leah believes that women should choose their husbands, but Tata Ndu is hard in believing that women are property to be bought by men. The conflicting opinions between Tata Ndu and Leah can be blamed

When one thinks about sacrifice their minds tend to think of it as noble deed that highlights what they value. They view it as the person has sacrificed something that is important for the greater good. However, this is not always the case and sometimes sacrifice can take people down some very dark paths and not only ruin their own life, but the lives of others around them. In The Poisonwood Bible, multiple characters made sacrifices that were sometimes good and sometimes bad. The bad instances caused a lot of problems in the book. Throughout the book Nathan Price sacrificed his family’s life in America which showed how far he was willing to go to display his values, which would turn out to be his hamartia.

Initially appearing as a devout Christian Mr. Price slowly reveals his controlling personality. This characteristic is a direct source of the abuses he imposes upon his family, whether mentally or physically. The reader begins to realize this fact during conversations, especially about one’s about faith. If threatened, Nathan Price lashes out, and uses his beliefs as attacks against his children, but mostly his wife. Orleanna Price is wedded to Nathan Price, and is the subject of his cruelty. As a housewife, Mrs. Price is a direct result of Mr. Price’s controlling behavior, as illustrated in the conversation with the Underdowns. In an tempt to flee the country, Orleanna reaches out, but is quickly reminded of her place by a sarcastic remark from Nathan: “ ‘What is it you’d like to say, for your own part’ “ (Kingsolver 168). Mr. Price understands the grip he has upon his wife, and utilizes it to his full advantage, destroying her free will. Furthermore, he inflicts abuse upon his wife, both mentally and physically. Demonstrated by frequent arguments between the two, the result is usually a slap and/or comments that drain the life the life from Mrs. Price. At the end of a conversation between wife and husband about the attitude of Anatole, Mr. Price begin to scream at Orleanna for mocking him, followed by Nathan “grabbing her

The family consists of Orleanna, her husband Nathan, and their four daughters: Rachel, Leah, Adah, and Ruth May. The only characters who actually speak in the book are the girls. Rachel has the most negative view of Africa out of the five voices, calling the Congo a “heathen pandemony” before she has even lived there for a day (Kingsolver 6). Her superficial needs and utter disrespect for the natives of Africa show that she has no appreciation for the Congo and even that she believes it is beneath her. The opinions of her sister Leah on the same subject completely juxtapose the ones of Rachel. Leah sees the inner beauty of the Congo and she even embraces the cultural aspect of living in Africa. Leah joins the village hunt when they run out of food, even though she is a girl and it is atypical for girls to do that. She ultimately marries a Congolese man named Anatole, and lives out the rest of her life in Africa. While these two characters are vastly different from each other, they each experience the Congo in different ways, so neither of their viewpoints are wrong. This message that Kingsolver uses the characters to tell also applies to Africa itself; the people who live there see nothing wrong with their lives, but the rest of the world see them as uncultured and

Be careful. Later on you'll have to decide the sympathy they deserve” (Kingsolver 5), this implies that incidents will happen to each of these girls, some of which will lead to their lives to be changed forever. However, these incidents that occur may be deserved based on the actions and decisions they choose, leading them on the path to either “glory” or “damnation”. “The mother’s comment –“watch how she leads them on, pale-eyed, deliberate” (Kingsolver 5), makes it sound as if Orleanna is not as innocent as she seems to say she is and that she may have played a bigger role in the downfall of their family. “I saw a family of weaver birds work together for months on a nest that became such a monstrous lump of sticks and progeny and nonsense that it brought their whole tree thundering down” (Kingsolver 8). I think this is symbolic of the Price family’s errors and mistakes in the Congo that eventually led to the collapse of their own family. The quotes, “On a more earthly plane men in locked rooms bargained for the Congo's treasure. But I was there. Right on the head of that pin” (Kingsolver 8) and “We aimed for no more than to have dominion over every creature that moved upon the earth. And so it came to pass that we stepped down there on a place we believed unformed, where only darkness moved on the face of the waters” (Kingsolver 10) allude to the disaster that happened in Africa when the Western countries tried to assert control over the continent, spiraling the local governments into chaos and civil wars. “Vines strangling their own kin in the everlasting wrestle” alludes to how Orleanna's husband, Nathan, made his own children suffer in the Congo due to his selfish ways of trying to force Baptism onto the

Orleanna is the mother of four daughters and her being this character as well as her personality of being caring and invested in others creates her purpose for the story as retelling the story of her family and their trip to the Congo. She is creating this scene to show what happened and how she has learned from this experience and hopes to improve others lives based on her experiences. In the political allegory, Orleanna is the person in the world who has seen the wrong doing’s of the world, in this case the imperialism of countries, and advises those to step up and support the cause bettering lives of those less fortunate. Her character creates a call to action through the miseries she has seen her family struggle through. The author’s purpose in writing The Poisonwood Bible is to not only show the different influences and outcomes that colonialism has on people and nations, but to also show that it is wrong and not necessarily the superior way of doing something. Orleanna is the spokesperson for how the colonialism is wrong and something must

how Nathan’s neglect of his family affected Orleanna greatly. “ For six years, from age nineteen

Father-daughter relationships are commonly filled with unconditional love, but an adolescent's complete devotion can be abused by an unfit parent. In Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, the devout baptist minister Nathan Price traverses the luscious African country of the Congo along with his wife Orleanna and their four daughters: Rachel, Leah, Adah, and Ruth May. One of the Price girls, Leah, is introduced as having an indescribable adoration for her disparaging dad. However, as Leah matures into a young women, Nathan's racist, misogynistic, and all-around despicable acts turn what was once an affectionate worship for her father into an unaffected scorn.

In the end, the neck you save will be your own… What I feel down in my bones is the this is not a Christian kind of place. This is darkest Africa.” (Book 6, Chapter) Overall religious arrogance affected all the prices when arriving at the Congo, they came with the belief that everyone’s problems will be fixed by being on gods gracious side, yet nothing was fixed, this caused the price girls to begin losing faith and gaining an arrogance that their new beliefs are most correct.

This can be read as a religious allegory because it talks about the Baptist missionaries. They had to deal with the rejection from the Congolese people. The Congolese people rejected the religion and the Price family since they were white. The Price family also had to deal with the same diseases and situations as the people of the Congo. They had to sleep with mosquito nets or the mosquitos would have eaten them alive. Some of the Prices (Leah, Adah and Orleanna) almost got eaten by

This is apparent by the use of the character’s perspective about nature and the ultimate result it has upon them. This is in its most apparent shape when Orleanna says “We aimed for no more than to have dominion over every creature that moved upon the earth... Now you laugh, day and night, while you gnaw on my bones. But what else could we have thought? Only that it began and ended with us. What do we know, even now?” (Kingsolver 10). This quote by Orleanna about nature, shows the true power of it regarding the motifs of freedom and captivity. This is seen because of the fact that there is a progression and a change of thought that quickly evolves from the family and her thinking that they had the freedom to have dominion over nature, to she surrendering to nature and saying that she is captive forever because of nature that nature instead of being loving, betrayed her and is now seeking for the forgiveness of it. Another way this is seen it when Leah said “Its heavenly paradise in the Congo, and sometimes I want to live here forever,” (104). This extract from the novel at first glance may not seem like an important passage, but it is considering the fact that she feels that she has the motifs of freedom and love at her grasp as she feels free in the Congo and loves it. This ultimately will not last as their contrasting motifs will eventually kick in making her a prisoner of the Congo by her own merits keeping her captive in there for the rest of her life, while also betraying her because the land and the nature inside it made her lose her little sister. Finally, this connects to the thesis and the other paragraphs because of the fact that it shows this hope versus reality situation which is created when these motifs are combined, furthermore it shows the colorfulness of life in the book because of the fact that it shows the way

She is never the same after Ruth May’s death and it is shown through the novel on multiple occasions. It is most prevalent when Adah says “My mother’s sanest position is to wear only the necessary parts of the outfit and leave off the rest” (Kingsolver 492). This does not only show the effect of the Congo on her, but of how she thinks that Ruth May is still with the Congo in spirit. This has greatly affected her emotionally as seen in this quotation. Orleanna when she first found out that Ruth May died acted differently than how most people would act to the news. Leah says that, Mother did not rant or tear her hair. She behaved as if someone had already told her,” (368). The death of Ruth May affected her so greatly that she did not know what to do with news of her death. This shows how much Orleanna loved Ruth May and that the shock of her death affected her emotionally very much.

breaks free from Nathan. Even though Orleanna finds her freedom, she loses her faith. Orleanna